Did you know you can dye fabrics using veggies found in your kitchen? I have a lot of experience with conventional tie dye, however making dyes using natural materials is easy and fun!
To start our class, we took a look at the artist of the week, Kiva Motnyk. Motnyk is a fiber artist from New York who uses natural dyes to create the beautiful colors in her textiles. She even has her own farm where she grows the plants, fruits, and vegetables she uses to create her dyes. We noticed her fabric uses a lot of soft colors, and her sewn works remind us of nature!
Then, we got to work making our own dyes out of veggies, spices, and tea. To set up, I had chopped and measured two cups of each veggie (spinach, red cabbage, beets, and carrots) into bags. I then had a large coffee carafe filled with hot water and measuring cups.
We had 6 teams of kids and grown-ups which worked out perfectly for our stations. We had 4 teams use blenders with a ratio of 2 cups veggies, to one cup hot water. After blended to a pulp, we added one teaspoon salt, and strained the mixture through a cheese cloth into our squeeze bottles.
Two other teams used one half of a spice jar of turmeric with a cup of hot water, and the other team used 20 tea bags of tea with a cup of hot water. Each batch of dye yielded one large squeeze bottle.
The kids loved the hands-on experience of making the dye for themselves, and were so excited to use their dyes!
We then put the bottles at our dying station, and got ready to tie our fabric.
I created binders of instructions on how to create different tie dye patterns and the partners got to work tying up their fabric to prepare it for our natural dye.
Then it was time to dye!
Look at these beautiful colors!
I then let the dyed fabric cure in a plastic bag overnight, and rinsed them out with cold water, line dried, and then set the dye with heat in the dryer and returned them to the students the next class. Overall, the beets, tea, and turmeric won the prize of “best dye.” The students were a little disappointed that some of the dyes didn’t work as well as others, however that is just part of experimenting with natural materials. Some will work better than others, and we don’t know until we try! Overall, everyone enjoyed the process, and everyone was engaged with the hands-on making of the dye.
When I returned the fabric to the students, I also included directions to these two easy, no-sew projects so they would be able to use what they had made. I included a piece of large yarn for the garland as well as an embroidery hoop.
If you are looking for further information about creating natural dyes, I found this video tutorial very helpful and informative.
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